| Term Paper Title | Cervantes - Don Quixote |
| # of Words | 1037 |
| # of Pages (250 words per page double spaced) | 4.15 |
Cervantes - Don Quixote
Cervantes' greatest work, Don Quixote, is a unique book of
multiple dimensions. From the moment of its appearance it
has amused readers or caused them to think, and its
influence has extended in literature not only to works of
secondary value but also to those which have universal
importance. Don Quixote is a country gentleman, an
enthusiastic visionary crazed by his reading of romances of
chivalry, who rides forth to defend the oppressed and to
right wrongs; so vividly was he presented by Cervantes that
many languages have borrowed the name of the hero as the
common term to designate a person inspired by lofty and
impractical ideals.
The theme of the book, in brief, concerns Hidalgo Alonso
Quijano, who, because of his reading in books about
chivalry, comes to believe that everything they say is true
and decides to become a knight-errant himself. He assumes
the name of Don Quixote de la Mancha and, accompanied
by a peasant, Sancho Panza, who serves him as a squire,
sets forth in search of adventures. Don Quixote interprets
all that he encounters in accordance with his readings and
thus imagines himself to be living in a world quite different
from the one familiar to the ordinary men he meets.
Windmills are thus transformed into giants, and this
illusion, together with many others, is the basis for the
beatings and misadventures suffered by the intrepid hero.
After the knight's second sally in search of adventure,
friends and neighbors in his village decide to force him to
forget his wild fancy and to reintegrate himself into his
former life. The "knight" insists upon following his calling,
but at the end of the first part of the book they make him
return to his home by means of a sly stratagem. In the
second part the hidalgo leaves for the third time and
alternately gives indication of folly and of wisdom in a
dazzling array of artistic inventions. But now even his
enemies force him to abandon his endeavors. Don Quixote
finally recognizes that romances of chivalry are mere lying
inventions, but upon recovering the clarity of his mind, he
loses his life.
The idea that Don Quixote is a symbol of the noblest
generosity, dedicated to the purpose of doing good
disinterestedly, suggests the moral common denominator
to be found in Cervantes' creation. But in addition to
furnishing a moral type capable of being recognized and
accepted as a symbol of values in any time or place, Don
Quixote is a work of art with as many aspects and reflections
as it has readers to seek them. Considerations of general
morality thus become intermingled with the psychological
and aesthetic experience of each individual reader in a way
that vastly stimulated the development of the literary genre
later known as the novel, and Fielding, Dickens, Flaubert,
Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, and many others have thus been
inspired by Cervantes. In Madame Bovary, is Gustave
Flaubert, for example, the heroine changes the orientation
of her life because she, like Don Quixote, has read her
romances of chivalry, the romantic novels of the nineteenth
century.
Cervantes demonstrated to the Western world how poetry
and fantasy could coexist with the experience of reality
which is perceptible to the senses. He did this by
presenting poetic reality, which previously had been
confined to the ideal region of dream, as something
experienced by a real person, and the dream thus b...Read entire document
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